I received my "draft notice" to report for induction in early September, 1961. Mary (my spouse) and I were engaged to be married sometime in the future. Our engagement was official on my birthday, May 13, 1961, as a fabulous party in Mary's parents' home in Jamaica, Queens. I was working steadily, though on and off, as a freelancer photographer for PARIS-MATCH out of their NYC offices. I also was lucky to have small assignments from other publications and some small adverts but had not yet worked for LIFE or LOOK magazines.

I had been visiting Ruth Lester, the Contributions Editor at LIFE for several months. Ruth was a real dear, tremendously encouraging of my work (and many other beginning photojournalists). Though she had no real "clout" as far as getting assignments from LIFE, she was well positioned to discover new talent and recommend them to the Picture Editor, Dick Pollard. I was lucky enough to get a recommendation and Dick looked through my portfolio of PARIS-MATCH and other photos but his Rolodex was full of stringers and available young freelancers. We shook hands and the best that came of that meeting was that Dick Pollard knew my name. Ruth Lester encouraged me to shoot local news events and bring her the film. She would have the LIFE lab process the film and see to it that the editors in the Newsfronts Department had an opportunity to view my work. Who knows? I just might sell and picture to LIFE. She'd finish up by replacing my film wirth some from the LIFE storeroom.

It was Ruth who sent me down to meet with the George "Buddy" Bloodgood, the Picture Editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, a few floor below in the TIME-LIFE building on Avenue of the Americas and 51st Street. Buddy was a crewcut, beaming, shirt-sleeved, Irishman, who offered me a shot of Irish Whiskey behind closed doors. He liked my portfolio of photographs but astutely told me that I was no sports photographer. I thought I had "struck out" once again and was preparing to leave the meeting when he added: "But I like your people pictures. You're a great photographer of people and I can use you just in those cases when I need pictures of people. Human interest stuff. Okay?" I shook his hand. "When can I start?" I asked. He earched his desk for some papers and came up with a sheet. "This weekend," he answered. "Wildwood, New Jersey. You know it? It's on the shore. Cover the National Marble Championships. I'm serious. The action is, not what I would call, sport-like." And so I was in at TIME-LIFE publications.

This was several months before my draft notice arrived. I was to report to 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan where I would undergo a complete physical and mental exam and if I passed, would be sworn into military service and sent to Fort Dix, NJ for basic training.

More about my two years in the U.S. Army working in the Pentagon as the "Chief Army Photographer" (my thanks to Dirck Halstead who held that position and passed it on to me).

It was to be my first feature film. Edgar Scherick of Palomar Pictures in New York had hired me to adapt an Algis Budrys short story (it had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post) into a screenplay. Chokeberry Bay was completed in the fall of 1969 and went through two directors. The first, an award winning Czech, Jiri Weiss (90 Degrees in the Shade), under whose tutelage I learned to write film was fired over the 4th of July weekend in 1970 because he didn’t know that William Holden was an actor. That was the end of Jiri and the rewrite we worked on together. I was then matched with a director whose name I have since committed to the dead brain cells of the ganja-smoking ‘60s.

Chokeberry Bay was basically a three character show, the antagonist a 60-ish retired, crippled U.S. Army Colonel who walked around his beachfront compound with the assistance of aluminum cuffed-crutches and two trained Dobermans that could open doors, fetch packages, and keep intruders frozen in their frightened tracks. The other two, a young married couple from the big city, become his captives.

On a summer’s Sunday morning in 1970, while visiting my folks at their lake house in Connecticut, I received a call from Edgar telling me to meet him immediately at JFK to fly to “Hollywood” for a quick meeting with Marlon Brando who was interested in our film but required a face to face meeting.

I met Edgar with the clothes on my back: Levis, a pair of rough-worn, steel-toed, bridge-builder work boots, a heavy work shirt and a paper bag filled with a razor, a comb and a fresh pair of boxers. Oh, and my shoulder length hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Where’s your clothes?” Edgar asked. “Home,” I answered. “I didn’t have a chance to get them.” “You’re going to L.A. like that?” he snickered. “You’re going to meet Brando like that? You look like street bum. No one’ll take you seriously.”

Edgar apologized to everyone for my appearance, telling them I wasn’t with him. It was true, in 1979, no one traveled by air wearing jeans and work boots, certainly not in First Class. At the Bel Air Hotel, he apologized to the Desk Clerk for the way I was dressed, handed me the keys to my cottage and told me that in the morning we’d go down into Beverly Hills to buy me slacks and a decent shirt and a pair of shoes.

We didn’t have the time to do that in the morning because Brando had moved the noon meeting up to 10 AM. We joined the new director and the production designer (they had been checking locations on the West Coast) at the Bel Air’s pool. I was in the same clothing I wore the day before. My freshly shampooed ponytail glistened in the California sun. I was shocked to see the director dressed in a lime green, zippered jump suit (jump suits were IN then) with matching lime green, leather boots. With his enormous midsection and beard he looked like Orson Welles dressed as a cough drop.

Edgar couldn’t wait to comment on my appearance to the director and the designer and wondered if we’d pass a “five and dime” to get me some pants and shoes. Later, I found the time to whisper to Edgar and ask why he hadn’t commented on the green jump suit. No response. He obviously approved. After all, directors are artists and therefore, quirky.

The four of us drove up to Mulholland Drive in a rented car and through the gates to Brando’s compound. Marlon’s lawyer showed us into the Brando living room where he asked if we wanted any coffee or tea. Edgar said “No.” Like for all of us. But I was in the mood and asked for some tea. I got a dagger stare from Edgar but it was too late, the drink dam had burst and everyone ordered something.

Waiting ten minutes for Brando, his lawyer explained that Brando owed “hundreds of thousands of dollars to his credit cards” and was in need of a job, and for us to be prepared to pay dearly. This was of course, just before The Godfather.

When Brando appeared, carrying a beautiful, silver tea service, with lovely china cups, he was wearing work boots, blue jeans, a work shirt, and his shoulder length hair was pulled back in what he later explained was a “Tahitian knot.” Brando focused on me and asked how I wanted my tea. It was marvelous the way, during our meeting, he directed all of his comments to me even refusing to look at the lime green jump-suited director.

What we discovered was Brando wanted to play the young married guy, saying he couldn’t honestly play any younger than perhaps forty-two. I told him that we wanted him for the Colonel and his eyes glazed over. “Oh, you want me to play the Colonel…” he mumbled in his Brando-ish way. “Okay. I can do that.” At which point, as he walked around his living room, he proceeded to rewrite the script. He saw the picture set in Ireland; he saw himself and an Irish Colonel who commanded his dogs by playing the violin. He acted out scenes as they came to him, playing all the parts, all of which had me transfixed. In the car, driving out of the compound, Edgar’s only comment was, “Okay, Brando’s out.”

Ultimately, the director fired me and rewrote the script, then cast Alan Alda to play the part of the Colonel, demoting him to Captain, and finally, asking the three principal actors, including a young Blythe Danner, to improvise the movie. The experiment failed and the final film, renamed To Kill a Clown was named to the “Ten Worst Films of All Time,” an honor my friend Alan Alda and I can laugh about—now.

When I told my mother that I had decided to become a photographer the first question she asked me was “Yes, but what are you really going to do to earn a living?” And Dad followed up with: “You should take teaching. A teacher will always find a job, wherever you go. Then, on weekends and during the summers you can be a photographer.”

Of course they had reasons to believe that. They had lived through the Depression and those people lucky enough to have worked for the government, like, say, teachers, postal workers, police officers and firemen, even garbagemen, continued to earn a living while others, like my father and his pals they lost jobs and couldn’t find work. Another reason they had problems with me becoming a photographer: the only other photographers they had any contact with were either the sweaty guys who rudely careened through my bar mitzvah snapping pictures, or, the mousy guy who once shot their mug shots, who had fumbled over his shutter cable checking the exposure over and over again even though he had shot the same picture in the same place, with the same camera, the same lens, on the same film, using the same lighting for thirty freaking years. You can see why I still get agata whenever I think about it. The most important thing in my life - then.

The other unspoken reason for their concern was that they had no reason to believe I would succeed at making a living as any kind of photographer, and so, when I finally told them I wanted to take pictures for magazines they really rolled their eyes. You see, I had a history of dreaming. When they were buying a small piece of land on a lake in Ridgefield, Connecticut, to build their summer home, I would fall asleep dreaming of the pirate ship I would build and sail out on the lake. It would have a small cabin where I would sleep and the raised quarterdeck where I would sit and study the lakeshore ready to attack unsuspecting boaters.

I will be posting recollections as they come to me - so - they will not be necessarily in chronological order.

Beginnings

My father had a Voightlander folding camera. I liked to play with it, opening it, pulling the lens and bellows out. As much I tried I could never learn to use it. I remember taking the camera and tripod on a class trip to the Museum on 81st Street and Central Park West in New York. Arranging the camera outfit in front of the dioramas of wild animals hunted and killed by Theodore Roosevelt and stuffed to look completely natural, in their natural settings (I thought that was the reason it was named The Natural History Museum), I shot one roll of 620 film and dropped it off at the drugstore on Featherbed Lane, not far from my family’s apartment on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx. I can still sense the anticipation when retrieving the processed roll only to find out that little, if anything, “came out”. I mention this because when I announced, years later, that I had chosen to become a professional magazine photographer my family cracked up laughing.

You see, I already had a history of trying my damnedest to make something, or build something, that usually failed -- humiliatingly so, because my dad was the greatest fixer/maker of all time -- and I truly mean that -- he was a cabinetmaker who measured each piece of wood three times before cutting it. His joints fit perfectly. His edges were smooth. His nail holes were filled and sanded until they disappeared. He put the tiniest wood scraps to good use. And so, whenever I tried to build something he would arrive at my shoulder, watch for a moment or two, then tell me what I was doing wrong and within minutes, he’d take the tools out of my hands and begin remaking whatever it was I was attempting to assemble.

I would observe his incredible dexterity with a plane or chisel, a tack hammer, glue, clamps for a while but I would eventually grow bored and wander off searching for something else to do. Something, perhaps, that would give me a satisfying completion experience.

It was during this period of my struggles with trial and error that I had the good fortune of having two gifted photographers move in to the small building across the street from me.

I first noticed Simon Nathan lugging his “gadget bags” up the long flight of steps from the Mt. Eden elevated train station. Making his acquaintance I was soon baby-sitting for his, and his spouse, Ida Wyman’s children, David and Nancy. In return, not only was I paid a few quarters, but, I was given limited access to some of Simon’s amazing cameras. He instructed me, encouraged me, and within a short time, I was taking pictures with Nikons! And he developed them. And they came out!

After graduating from New York’s High School of Industrial Arts (now the School of Art and Design), I went off to Ohio University to study photography under the tutelage of Clarence White and Walt Allen. It was in the Photog building that I met my friend, Paul Fusco (Look, then Magnum Photos) who told me time and again “Don’t quit taking pictures, Chuck. You’ve got something to say.” And Bob McElroy (Newsweek) who, easily annoyed by my constant pestering questions about lenses and papers and film stock, chased me from the photo lab at O.U.. Thanks for being my friend and for shooting my wedding, 40 years ago, still among the greatest all time collection of wedding pictures.

Thrown in among a talented pool of photographers like college roommate, the late Vitas Valitis (BlackStar), graduating senior, Ben Martin (Time Magazine) and Fusco and McElroy, I learned how to see pictures, print them so that they could be “read”, how to choose subjects and most important of all, how to anticipate a photograph beginning to “form” and be ready to capture it in a moment of time.